Monday, April 14, 2014

What Kelp Remembers

Weird Tales, one of the best and oldest horror and dark fantasy magazines, has just launched a new series of ultra-short flash fiction (under 500 words), Flashes of Weirdness. To inaugurate the series, they've chosen a piece of mine -- which is now my second publication in speculative fiction.

My philosophical aim in the story -- What Kelp Remembers -- is to suggest that on a creationist or simulationist cosmology, the world might serve a very different purpose than we're normally inclined to think.

At some point, I want to think more about the merit of science fiction as a means of exploring metaphysical and cosmological issues of this sort. I suspect that fiction has some advantages over standard expository prose as a philosophical tool in this area, but I'm not satisfied that I really understand why.

6 comments:

  1. Perhaps you're just discovering something what French philosophes have always known: Voltaire's Candide, Camus' The Stranger ... it seems de rigeur for French thinkers to express themselves in fiction and drama. Even the Germans got into the act a little with Nietzsche.

    But not, of course, in the prim and proper Anglo-American tradition! I'll grant you Iris Murdoch, but she was Irish-born. Ayn Rand doesn't count. Russian.

    http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/apr/11/sean-mcgrady-top-10-philosophers-novels

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  2. That's a lovely story. Perhaps fiction works because you don't have to situate fiction in the field at the outset - a process which inevitably involves use of contested terminology. The narrative function of fiction then acts like a big red neon arrow saying "please look at this idea", so you get less quibbling with concepts which are not central to your thesis.

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  3. Michel: You're right -- not so much in the Anglo-American tradition, though Dan Dennett's "Where Am I?" is a classic and maybe we can count Olaf Stapledon. Most of my favorite historical philosophers have crossed and blended genre, and there's really quite a long list of great philosophers who have done this well, going back to Plato in the West and Zhuangzi in the East.

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  4. Chinaphil: Interesting point. I do think that's part of the advantage, though I suspect there are other things at work too.

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  5. Maybe being more emotionally involved in the text, through characters and an interesting setting, makes the philosophical ideas seem more alive and relevant.

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